After the euphoria.

AFTER THE EUPHORIA

SUMMITS ALWAYS generate euphoria: the smiles, the handshakes, the official optimism. So, after Reagan-Gorbachev III, let us try to look beyond, to some persistent realities.

The amazing acceleration of the arms-control process during the past year is entirely in line with what I have called "the Ogarkov factor" (NR, June 5, 1987): the view, correctly attributed to Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, that the Soviet Union could no longer assume victory in a nuclear exchange, that the presence of the Pershing IIs and cruise missiles in Europe posed a real threat to Soviet territory, and that therefore, at almost any cost, the Soviets should negotiate them away.

This has now happened, and it is, I am sorry to say, a poor way of rewarding defenders of freedom in Western Europe who fought heroically against the tide of unilateral pacifism that threatened to make Soviet dominance in intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) complete, and who, against the odds, created the climate of public opinion that enabled their governments to go ahead with deployment of a counterforce to the Soviet SS-20s.

The argument that the INF treaty was the reward for Western firmness, whereas unilateralism would have got us nowhere, should not be dismissed out of hand, but should be tested against the net outcome and the new outlook for the Alliance.

From the Soviet standpoint, what has happened is this. From 1978 to 1985, Western Europe was at the mercy of Soviet intentions. Then deployment of the Pershings and the cruises got under way. Suddenly, the USSR felt under threat, so negotiations were resumed. And now? When dismantling starts, Soviet territory will no longer be threatened in the same way. Of course, there is the French force de frappe, and Britain's naval nuclear force, but these, though useful as bargaining chips with the Soviets, do not challenge theater supremacy in the same way as Pershings and cruises.

So, the net effect is that the immediate Western threat to the USSR is fading, while, as I never tire of pointing out, the Soviet threat to the West remains, in its alternative forms: biological and chemical weapons and crushing conventional superiority. When Messrs. Shultz and Shevardnadze had done their signing, NATO's top European military officer, West German General Wolfgang Altenberg, told a meeting of Alliance defense ministers that he was acutely worried about the lack of progress in East-West talks toward cutting non-nuclear forces in Europe, which he saw as crucial in the light of the INF accord.

Of course, in the prevailing euphoria, we are told that a pact on non-nuclear forces is on the way. Well, perhaps it is, but it is surely worth pointing out that the Soviets' incentive to negotiate on reducing biochemical and conventional forces, if it existed at all, is minimal now that the immediate threat has been removed.

This brings me to more fundamental issues. The amazing glasnost offensive continues, even though it does falter occasionally. The brutal removal of the Moscow Party chief, Boris Yeltsin --an ex-protege (very "ex") of Mikhail Gorbachev--was a sudden reminder that Stalinism still lies just below the surface of Soviet official life.

Every now and then, however, there is the unexpected bonus. Here are two examples. For the past two or three years, the Soviet disinformation apparatus has been disseminating the big lie, eagerly reproduced in many places (including some unlikely ones, such as the London Sunday Express), that the AIDS virus was man-made in a CIA experiment. Toward the end of October, two eminent Soviet scientists, Academicians Roald Z. Sagdeyev and Vitaly I. Goldansky, publicly dissociated themselves from this preposterous charge.

My second example is different in kind, but no less significant. Ever since President Reagan launched the SDI concept, the termination of the U.S. Space Defense program has been a top Soviet priority, for exactly the same reasons as the removal of the Western intermediate-range nuclear weapons has been. Why? Because the U.S. defensive shield, once in position, would largely--perhaps completely-- nullify the Soviet ability to strike at U.S. territory. As part of the argument, the Soviets always refused to admit the fact, known to American intelligence, that they themselves were further along the road to space defense than the United States was.

And then, suddenly, Gorbachev, on the eve of the Washington Summit, admitted to Tom Brokaw of NBC that the Soviets have indeed long been working on their own version of "Star Wars." Such candor! Such glasnost!

THE POINT is this: my two examples are closely connected. Roald Sagdeyev, the man who now denounces the AIDS ploy, has been leading the Soviets in talks with American scientists on scuttling SDI. On the Soviet side, of course, these talks are sanctioned and official. The American participation, though, is private and unauthorized. The venerable Mr. Paul Nitze, an arms-control veteran, is said to have been rebuked by the President himself for lending his support to the American involvement.

And so, on the eve of the Washington Summit, Gorbachev came clean. The double effect was clearly intentional. The American world of science thinks Mr. Sagdeyev is a jolly good fellow, and the wider political world can see what a jolly good fellow the General Secretary is. But then, we knew that all along. Or didn't we?